Talia's Tour de Force
by Lorendiac
Summary: After the failure of their second attack on Gotham, the League of Shadows is on the run, and Ra's al Ghul left no clear successor to lead it. His daughter has plans, but it won't be easy to get senior members of the League to cooperate.
1. Chapter 1: Preparing to Engage

**Author's Note:** The movies told us nothing of what had happened to the League of Shadows _after_ their second ambitious plan for destroying Gotham fell flat on its face. Being a longtime fan of the Batman comic books, I prefer to believe that Ra's al Ghul's daughter would be heavily involved in reorganizing the remnants of the League after her daddy was no longer calling the shots. However, what we saw of that secret society in _Batman Begins_ did not exactly make it look like an equal opportunity employer where female members were plentiful and had a fair chance of making it to the top of the hierarchy and giving orders to lots of macho male warrior types—in fact, I'm only taking it on faith that an _occasional_ female (such as Ra's al Ghul's daughter) might actually be permitted to qualify as a member in good standing.

Recently I began stretching my imagination, trying to answer the question of how Talia might _nonetheless_ improve her position in the League after her father's death. To help steer the plot in the correct direction, I made some sweeping _assumptions_ about how the League's internal rules of succession are supposed to work when the old leader drops dead—but hey, I figure _my_ wild guesses are as good as any other fan's! (You won't see much of that guesswork in this first chapter, though, for reasons I explain at the bottom.)

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**Talia's Tour de Force**

**Chapter One: Preparing to Engage**

Ask an ordinary man: _What are weapons?_

He may well speak of such classics as the sword, the spear, the bow, and the club. Moving on to more modern innovations, he is likely to mention guns, explosives, poison gas, and bioweapons.

Give him more time to ponder, and he may recall that trained fighters regard their own hands and feet—and in a larger sense their entire bodies—as deadly weapons.

As an afterthought, he may observe that there are other, subtler ways of imposing your will upon your fellow human beings—sometimes leading to physical injury or death—by adroit use of law, economics, theology, and other intangibles.

But anyone trained by the League of Shadows knows that the proper scope of the word "weapon" is easily defined: _Anything_ can be a weapon!

Of course, putting that idea into practice requires that the wielder have three things: The _wit_ to recognize what can be used effectively in the current circumstances; the _skill_ to employ the potential weapon well enough to accomplish something; and most important of them all, the _will_ to use anything available to further your goals in the face of opposition.

The Eurasian-looking woman who had just spent an hour applying makeup to her own delicately-featured face had received all the training the League of Shadows had to offer. She could hold her own with blades, firearms, garrotes, and bare hands. She could improvise with various other items which might be available in time of need—chairs, cleaning chemicals, electrical appliances, broken glass, and so forth. But she was also one of the very few members of the League who undeniably could use personal _beauty_ as a weapon. That last item was likely to be more useful in the next several hours than any of the methods covered in the League's standard curriculum.

Not that she was vain enough to think her beauty alone could carry the day. but every little bit helped. The people she had to impress this time were middle-aged heterosexual males, after all. Classic chauvinists, to boot. What they would tolerate from a very attractive young woman with a well-trained voice was bound to be more than what they would have accepted from a frump with a nasal whine.

Under other circumstances, the young woman might have been willing to shrug philosophically and let the remaining senior officers of the League of Shadows blunder along without the benefit of her unorthodox advice. But the current circumstances were incredibly bad; worse than they had been in many centuries.

It was possible that the League of Shadows had finally bitten off _much more_ than it could chew.

Before its second great operation against Gotham, the League had essentially stayed "under the radar" of the American intelligence community. If the CIA had ever heard of the League, it must have been only as a warrior cult based somewhere in the Himalayas, allegedly telling its prospective recruits that it had secretly shaped turning points in the fates of various empires of olden times. All of which must have sounded as implausible as the grandiose claims made by other "secret societies," such as the Rosicrucians or the Order of Saint Dumas, so why would the CIA care enough to pursue the matter any further?

But that was how things must have stood when the League was not _known_ to have done anything particularly destructive in the modern world. In the post-9/11 environment, a cold-blooded attempt to use psychoactive chemicals with intent to render millions of civilians violently insane in a single night was bound to attract a great deal of unfavorable attention from Uncle Sam.

Actually, even in the _Pre_-9/11 world, such an attempt would not exactly have been greeted with cheers and smiles by the U.S. government. But after planes crashed into the Pentagon and the Twin Towers, new mechanisms were created for responding more quickly and efficiently to any similar large-scale act of terrorism that might transpire on American soil in the future. Until recently, the League's great strength had been that its major operations normally didn't look like deliberately orchestrated acts of terrorism in the first place.

Take the Gotham operation of a generation ago, for instance.

Most Americans had been predisposed to blame the _near_-collapse of Gotham on a combination of three major factors: corrupt local government; crime running rampant in that metropolitan area and scaring investors away; and the fundamental cluelessness of most of the politicians in Washington, D.C. when it came to "solving" economic problems.

Since each of those points had considerable basis in fact (the third point in particular being a near-constant in human affairs throughout recorded history), it was not terribly surprising that most people had found this tripartite explanation to be satisfactory.

Unfortunately, such protective camouflage didn't apply to the League's latest approach to the Gotham problem. Financial troubles can be (and usually are) the cumulative effect of many people spending years doing dishonest and/or foolish things for self-centered, short-sighted reasons without quite realizing what will result . . . no conspiracy theory is required to untangle that sort of mess. But it is extremely hard to persuade anyone that a modern city's entire water supply has been contaminated with tons of a powerful psychoactive drug, which was then activated as drug-laced steam started saturating the local air thanks to a powerful stolen microwave emitter . . . all by sheer _accident!_

Not that anyone had even _tried_ to sell that version to the public. The young woman had not been part of the detailed planning for the Gotham operation; she had only made sure the money from Swiss accounts flowed wherever her father said it was needed. She'd trusted him to know what he was doing with the resources he had gathered in that city. But when she read the newspaper coverage in the days after the plan was foiled and Ra's al Ghul was killed in a fall, she had found herself stunned by the blatancy of this attack. There was no way the FBI, the CIA, and all those other alphabet-soup agencies were going to believe this had been an accident, a natural disaster, or even the action of a couple of home-grown American nutcases such as the Oklahoma City bombing of 1995.

Garden-variety terrorism was the obvious assumption, but it seemed her father had made no efforts whatsoever to plant clues blaming this one on Al-Qaeda . . . or another faction of Islamic extremists . . . or anybody at all!

When she was overseeing the financing of the thing from afar, she had _assumed_ some of the money would be spent on such details. Perhaps round up a couple of Al-Qaeda operatives, somewhere, transport them to Gotham, kill them, and leave them where the police would find and identify them in due course? Or the whole thing could have been false-flagged—find a way to convince a few such men that they had been selected for a real Al-Qaeda operation, _let them_ be captured alive, and then what they told the authorities would be exactly what law enforcement personnel were predisposed to believe!

There was no sign that any such deception had even been attempted in Gotham—although her father had been there, personally directing the final stages of the operation. Had each of his loyal warriors assumed that someone else was assigned to set up the appropriate smoke screens? Had her father been losing his grip without anyone noticing, to try anything so _brazen _while expecting the League of Shadows to walk away from it unscathed? Even though he failed to provide false trails to a convenient group of fall guys?

It seemed as if Henri Ducard had forgotten why his beloved organization was called the League of _Shadows;_ not the League of _Show-Offs_.

Although members of the League were brave and well-disciplined, they were not conditioned to commit suicide at the drop of a hat if capture seemed likely. In this case, some had been taken alive and were quickly identified as perpetrators of the recent terrorist attack. An assistant D.A. named Rachel Dawes had been particularly astute in sorting out the wolves from the sheep, advising agents of the FBI and other agencies as to which prisoners merited extra attention.

(If you were in the know, it was not hard to guess who had been coaching Ms. Dawes behind the scenes, perhaps even identifying certain faces remembered from a former training facility in the Himalayas.)

Among those prisoners, at least one must have been . . . persuaded . . . to tell enough to confirm Ms. Dawes's assertions regarding who had orchestrated the near-collapse of Gotham.

After this, the League of Shadows was marked by Uncle Sam for the same warm and sympathetic treatment accorded to such fun-loving organizations as Al-Qaeda. Just saying "League of Shadows" in a phone call was likely to attract the attention of supercomputers at Fort Meade, and your chances of keeping a low profile would rapidly go downhill from there. Many of the League had now been captured in odd parts of the world; many other members were believed to have gone to ground when they saw the writing on the wall, severing all communications with branch offices until the situation had settled down and it was easier to determine who could _safely_ be contacted.

Now, for the first time in several months, remaining senior officers of the League were gathering to discuss the future of their organization.

Being the Treasurer who controlled most of the remaining accounts, Talia had taken the initiative in organizing the meeting and sending out invitations, but it was far from certain that she could persuade the other attendees to start refocusing the League's efforts according to her ideas. She would have to stake it all on a line of argument which might seem ludicrous at first glance, but nonetheless had some basis in historical precedent and the League's long-standing by-laws.

She opened the outer door of her suite and started down the corridor to the conference room which the hotel had also provided for her. It was important that she already be seated at the table when the first guest arrived. The men she was expecting would have cheerfully awaited the convenience of Ra's al Ghul before starting their meeting, but they would not feel obligated to wait for Talia Ducard.

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**Author's Note:** Originally, much of what's in this chapter was going to be presented in dialogue going back and forth between different members of the League in the meeting which Talia is about to attend. But I finally realized I was in dire peril of falling into the "As You Know, Bob" Syndrome, where characters lecture each other at length on matters which everyone in the room should _already_ know all about. In such "conversations," the author is having his characters insult each other's intelligence just so they can _pretend_ to be lecturing each other when they are really lecturing the reader!

So I decided to bite the bullet and reorganize my story. Instead of going with my rough draft, in which this was supposed to be a single-chapter story centered around a meeting about who will run the League of Shadows from now on, I made it two chapters, with the first one a sort of prologue which frankly outlines the post-_Batman Begins_ situation as it is perceived by Talia, daughter of Ra's al Ghul, in the privacy of her own mind. The actual meeting, with dialogue and power plays and some rather convoluted lawyering, will occur in the next chapter.


	2. Chapter 2: Early Exchanges

**Author's Note:** My rough draft for the actual meeting was less than 4000 words, and I honestly _thought_ it was almost ready to go at the time I posted what is now "Chapter 1." I was wrong. I kept trying to fill in gaps and flesh things out, and recently I realized the new-and-hopefully-improved draft for the meeting was well over 7000 words (and probably not quite done yet when I took that count). I doubted many of my readers would want to read all that in one gulp, so I reluctantly chose to divide that material into two chapters—the one you're about to read, and the one I'll post in another two or three days. Weeks ago, when I first worked out the general idea for how this story's plot would go, and started writing dialogue for it, I thought I was looking at a single-chapter story. Now it has morphed into a _three_-chapter story (still following the original plot outline, though), but I don't intend to let it go any further than that. (Hey! Stop looking so skeptical!)

**

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**

**Chapter Two: Early Exchanges**

This conference room of the suite provided by the hotel had a look of very quiet luxury to it. Muted colors, old-fashioned designs for the furniture, soft carpet with a deep pile that absorbed the sound of footfalls, relaxing abstract art hanging on the walls . . . the environment discreetly avoided calling attention to itself, but if you insisted upon looking hard, you could see that the things in this room had cost a pretty penny indeed. The soundproofing was not obvious, but it was there, and various other precautions had been taken in this windowless room to assure that any meetings around this table would be as confidential as the participants cared to keep them.

The woman known as Talia Ducard (according to one of her many passports) wore a purple brocade cheong-sam today; long-sleeved and with the traditional high Mandarin collar. That was a proper look for this meeting. Ostentatiously displaying some cleavage on such a solemn occasion would have been taken as a _childishly_ obvious attempt to distract male eyes, and thus would be counterproductive. Any overt flirting would likewise meet with disapproval when she still should be mourning the recent loss of her sire. (And so she was, in her own way.)

But the high collar did not mean a dress of this style could not be alluring. Carefully tailored in Hong Kong, the cheong-sam hugged her excellent figure without striving to _conceal_ it. Furthermore, the slits up each side of the skirt could show off her well-toned legs to advantage when she was walking about the room, greeting each arrival, but everything from the waist down would be out of sight as soon as she was seated at the conference table, thereby avoiding any charge of trying to constantly distract the males with flashes of skin. (Although she felt that if these men couldn't remember perfectly well what her legs had looked like after the first good look, then they weren't the men she took them for.)

This conference was likely to be the most important meeting Talia would ever attend, live she ever so long. She had scripted out half a dozen ways it might go, and rehearsed how she would make key points at the right moments, all this while knowing full well that it would be a miracle if each of the other participants actually behaved in such a way as to end up following perfectly any of her outlines.

That wasn't really the point—practicing one variation after another had helped her stay flexible, so that she wouldn't panic if actual events failed to resemble her first dry run.

The time proposed in her invitations was 10:00 a.m. However, she had leased this suite for the whole day, paid a security firm to sweep it for bugs at seven this morning, paid another security firm to sweep it at eight, and then stood or sat in the room herself from that moment forward. It felt vital that she be present to greet each arrival, no matter how early he might appear.

Al-Hazred arrived thirteen minutes before the designated hour. Tall and sharp-featured, his leathery face was dark enough to show he still spent many hours each month outdoors in the desert so beloved of his Bedouin ancestors. He wore a Western-style business suit today, fitting for one who had studied law at Oxford.

It was an ancient rule that no more than _one_ member of the Seven at a time could possess a degree in law. The dread alternative was to end up with the situation found in the USA (and some other representative democracies), where lawyers as a class were ridiculously overrepresented in legislative bodies, and reluctant to endorse the efforts of mere _non_-lawyers to join the ruling class.

For the last twelve years, Al-Hazred had been that single lawyer permitted to sit at the same table with Ra's al Ghul's other senior lieutenants. Although he had a cynical attitude about the laws of individual nations, Talia was counting on him to have a proper respect for the rules which all members of the League were sworn to uphold. She greeted him in Arabic and they made small talk for a bit before

They made small talk in Arabic for a few minutes, then quieted by mutual consent and just waited.

Takaguchi strolled in at ten o'clock precisely; she suspected he had arrived in the hotel much earlier and then lingered somewhere nearby for several minutes to make sure he hit it on the nose.

Having mastered many languages from an early age, Talia had to _resist_ the temptation of greeting him in his mother tongue, calling him _Takaguchi-san,_ and giving a polite bow in the Japanese style. It all would have been meant respectfully, but he might not have taken it that way.

Her father had once told her, admiringly, that after Takaguchi had dedicated himself to their cause, he had begun working long and hard to suppress various ingrained mannerisms which were bound to leave non-Japanese members of the League feeling confused and/or uncomfortable, thereby distracting them from the business at hand. After taking all that trouble to blend in, beginning before Talia was born, Takaguchi would not thank her for using the language and traditions of his homeland in front of two non-Japanese comrades in arms. He was likelier to suspect her of subtly mocking him by treating him differently from the others; as if to imply he were still an outsider, not fully committed to the League's way of doing things.

So she greeted him in English, with no bowing on either side, and they went through the formality of asking about each other's flights to Geneva. Al-Hazred and Takaguchi had just nodded to each other; they had been rivals for years and neither seemed inclined to give away anything of his own intentions for this meeting.

Gutierrez arrived six minutes late. He was quite affable in his greeting, but offered no excuse for his tardiness, as he would have done to her father. Talia wondered if this was a subtle challenge, meant to either provoke her into trying to reproach him for lack of punctuality (as if she outranked him), or else to illustrate to the other attenders that she dared not say anything about it (because she knew she didn't outrank him).

If it were Takaguchi doing this, she would have been certain it was meant as an unspoken challenge—but this was Gutierrez, and his track record for punctuality had never been flawless. This was tolerated by her father because Gutierrez was very good at so many other things, including overseeing the training of other recruits when Ra's al Ghul was absent from League headquarters or otherwise occupied with administrative affairs.

Gutierrez was the most junior member of the Seven. Ra's al Ghul had elevated him to that position shortly after Bruce Wayne burned down the temple in the Himalayas. In other words: Gutierrez had only been promoted after it became painfully clear that her father's favorite protégé _wasn't_ going to accept a leadership position himself; the seat Ra's al Ghul had carefully been keeping open for him until then.

Everyone in the League recognized that Gutierrez had only been the consolation prize from their late leader's point of view—much better than average, but not the best possible man for the job. Before Wayne completed his training, Ra's had already been talking about appointing him to lead other men within the League; if Wayne had been catapulted into that vacancy in the Seven, it could have been several years before another slot opened up, and then Gutierrez _might_ finally have been tapped to fill that one instead.

Yes, everyone knew this, but no one had ever been tactless enough to say so to Gutierrez's face. He was nobody's fool; he must understand perfectly well what the timing of his promotion indicated; but if he saw no point in raising the topic himself in casual conversation, then what would anyone else gain by offending him as they belabored the painfully obvious?

While reflecting on what she knew of the man, Talia had exchanged a few meaningless pleasantries with Gutierrez. No one had claimed a seat yet. The table in this conference room was large enough to easily seat a dozen, and working from her orders, leather chairs had been provided for eight—one at the end nearest the door, one at the other end, and three more spaced out along each of the long sides. If all of the Seven had somehow appeared today, each would have found a seat waiting. Talia stepped to the chair at the far end and slid smoothly into the seat which might be considered the "head" of the table. No one told her not to; each man quietly selected a seat of his own.

Talia had wondered if one or another would take the seat at the opposite end and try to present it as the head of the table—but she'd figured the first man to try would gain the instant resentment or derision of the other two. Apparently they felt the same way. Gutierrez and Al-Hazred were now on her left; Takaguchi was seated halfway down on the right.

Now for the next calculated risk. Talia picked up a small gavel and rapped it lightly on the small sounding block resting on the tabletop.

None of the three men instantly protested the action—and she didn't give them more than a half-second to think it over before speaking a prepared piece.

"Gentlemen," she said briskly, "I was named a member of the League some years ago, but we all know that I am not—cannot be—one of the Seven. Thus, I will have no formal vote in your deliberations. However, since it pleased Ra's al Ghul to name me our Treasurer after I had completed a master's degree in economics, I took the liberty of using one of our Swiss accounts to set up this conference in a secure room, and then to entreat each of you to attend what would be the first formal meeting the Seven have had since the debacle in Gotham. I felt someone had to set the wheels in motion, and I am grateful that each of you was kind enough to come in response to one who knew she had no authority to insist upon your cooperation."

She paused for a carefully measured moment, while thinking: _Not kind—just practical. In these perilous times, none of you would want sweeping policy decisions to be made by others when he was absent, entirely unable to influence the flow of events. _

But she was far too diplomatic to say that, and each of these men now found it face-saving to murmur a few polite words about how they had been delighted to receive the timely invitation when things were so unsettled (or words to that effect). Gutierrez added gallantly that it was always a pleasure to see such a lovely young lady once again, on League business or otherwise. (She knew full well he didn't expect that comment to lead to anything between them; he was merely keeping in practice.)

After they had all agreed they were glad to be here, Talia added: "Since all three of you are of the same rank, I suggest that it may be simplest if I continue to chair this meeting . . . despite not having any vote to cast on any motions which arise . . . until such time as other arrangements have been decided upon by your honorable selves."

None of the three men were anxious to see a rival seize control of the agenda, so al-Hazred nodded curtly, Gutierrez shrugged indifferently, Takaguchi smiled blandly, and when she asked formally, "Is it your will that I keep the gavel for the time being?" . . . no one argued the point. Since no woman had ever been elected to the Seven, much less been considered eligible to lead the entire League, they presumably saw her as the safest, most "neutral" choice . . . for the purposes of this single meeting, that was.

__

One hurdle down.

Still, her small gain would be wiped out in an instant if she appeared indecently hasty to seize even this modicum of power. Her first short speech had needed to be made quickly, before someone insisted she had no right to lift a gavel at all, but now the tactics must change. Talia put on her most demure expression and silently counted to twenty in Urdu in case anyone chose to make a belated objection after a few moments of further consideration. She didn't expect that, but what really mattered at this stage was to conspicuously _demonstrate_ that she was modestly waiting for such an objection before moving on, rather than trying to railroad three proud men into a hasty decision and then pretending it was irrevocable.

No belated objections arose. None of these men would want to look wishy-washy in front of his peers after quietly acquiescing to her suggestion. Besides, they all knew that if she let it go to her head and became unduly "uppity," they'd still have the option of voting to take the gavel away from her at any time. (Or they could simply stand up and walk out, for that matter-she'd be powerless to stop them.)

Talia rapped the gavel again—_very_ lightly, just audible enough to demonstrate she had now figuratively accepted it as a "gift" from her guests—and said, "Very well; let us make it official. A meeting is hereby convened. I see three members of the Seven in attendance and I have no reason to think any more are _en route_. I submit, gentlemen, that our most pressing problem is the lack of strong central leadership for the scattered remains of the League of Shadows. Specifically, the death of Ra's al Ghul has left a vacancy at the very top. I invite discussion as to how the Seven may remedy the situation."

She hesitated a bare moment—and then added one last sentence before leaving the floor to the men. Her father had told her that _sometimes_ it was best to let a meeting meander for awhile, giving everyone present time to "talk himself out" before you even started trying to impose your own plan for how to move forward. And _sometimes_ that was a waste of valuable time and you should start nudging people in the right direction from the beginning.

Possibly she should have let the three men argue back and forth for awhile, but she preferred to gamble by making one little leading comment about the relevant rules before she shut up for a few minutes. "In fact, I recall my honored father telling me there were _three_ valid ways for a man to become our new leader." She folded her hands and waited.

"True in theory," Gutierrez agreed. "First, he could have been formally designated as the heir by the previous leader. That has happened many times in our history. But your father never got around to naming a successor, so that approach is only of academic interest today."

"Second, a challenger who had already proved himself worthy in other respects could defeat the incumbent in mortal combat," Takaguchi murmured. "But since our last incumbent has already perished, that method of resolving the problem seems as unlikely as the first . . . in this case."

"Third, any member of the League could be elected by a _majority_ of the Seven to be our new chief. Four votes in his favor would do it," Al-Hazred finished. "But we do not even have quorum today. I had hoped for a larger turnout, though I knew we would not have all these seats filled. Hoan is still imprisoned in Blackgate; I recently heard a rumor that Taleniekov died in Bucharest; but invitations were also sent for our brothers Fuest and Holcroft to attend this meeting. I do not see them here; I do not know where they are." He paused. "Unless anyone else has word that has not reached my ears?"

He glanced around the table, saw Talia, Takaguchi, and Gutierrez all shaking their heads, and resumed smoothly: "I thought not. Who knows if or when we shall ever hear from them again? But since they may well be alive, and even Taleniekov's passing is unconfirmed, we are at something of a standstill. For all we know, two or three of the Seven may well be huddled in quiet cellars in remote portions of the world, waiting for the hue and cry to fade away. Under our by-laws, lacking both their bodies and reliable witnesses to their deaths, we cannot assume them gone forever until two years have passed since they were last seen, and with only three votes present we cannot elect more members to fill seats in the Seven." He paused. "Not for two years, I meant to say; not until we _know_ that we are _all_ that is left of the Seven—aside from the brother held in captivity, who is obviously unable to participate in our councils. Likewise, a minority of three cannot elect a new leader for the entire League at this time. Were the rules otherwise, an arrogant _minority_ of the Seven could do any lunatic thing it pleased in the absence of the others!"

Takaguchi murmured, "And even supposing the time comes for an election with only three voters to be valid, it would be most distressing if we three found ourselves unable to concur on who should fill each vacancy. If I may present a fanciful hypothesis regarding a pitfall to be avoided . . . what if each surviving member of the Seven presented himself as a candidate for leader, and then each received one vote—presumably his own—in a perfect three-way tie?"

It was Talia's calculation that this "fanciful" hypothesis had an excellent chance of becoming simple reality if nothing else had changed before the required waiting period had elapsed. None of these three men doubted the dedication of the others, but none considered one of the others to be vastly his superior in administrative ability, either. Looking at the faces of Gutierrez and Al-Hazred, she decided that they evaluated it the same way.

Gutierrez made a token effort to laugh it off, though. "Possible in theory, but unlikely in practice, as you said! But even if it did happen that way on the first ballot, surely at least one of us would then realize he should postpone his own ambitions in favor of the greater good by switching his vote on the second ballot! Then the deadlock would be broken, a new leader could appoint additional members of the Seven on his own authority, and the League would move forward again!"

"Of course that would be the _likely_ outcome," Takaguchi said amiably, deceiving no one. "If even one more of the Seven had appeared at this meeting, I am sure we would be selecting a new leader at this very moment. It may yet happen—if not today, then sometime in the not-so-distant future—that another of the Seven reestablishes contact and we shall have quorum after all. But if I may explore my fanciful hypothesis just a bit further?"

No one tried to refuse him permission, so Takaguchi proceeded apace. "Supposing a stalemate arose along the lines I described, we might then table the matter of a new leader in favor of first filling the vacancies among the Seven. But I find myself imagining with some trepidation the prospect of each of us nominating a few friends whom he felt could be relied upon to subsequently support his own candidacy for leader . . . and the other two of us hesitating to allow a rival to pack the Seven with his own supporters. Which could leave us with an ongoing three-way tie for a ridiculously long time." He leaned back in his chair, making a gesture to signal that he was done speaking for the nonce.

"In all our history, I don't think anything that sticky has ever left the League leaderless for any great length of time," Al-Hazred observed. "On the other hand, we've never before faced an enemy with all the resources available to the world's sole superpower of the early twenty-first century. The Chinese, the Persians, the Romans, the Byzantines, the British of a few centuries agone . . . none of them knew anything about electronics, and often precious little about forensic examination of stray bits of evidence. Great fires, plagues, and the like were blamed on angry deities or sheer bad luck."

Talia was too well-schooled in diplomacy to ever need to _literally_ bite her tongue to restrain an ill-timed outburst, but she had been tempted at least five times in the last five minutes. Now, however, she felt the time was as ripe as it would get for the next phase of her plan.

She rapped her gavel again. "Gentlemen, you agreed that a new leader for the League could arise in any of three ways . . . depending upon circumstances. I have listened intently to your able discussion of the problems which prevent you from utilizing the _third_ method to find a leader now or in the near future. But the picture you paint is so _discouraging_ that I find myself wondering if one of the other possibilities deserves a second look before we abandon all hope for it."

(This was not true. She'd already known what solution she intended to propose before she ever leased this conference suite and sent out the encrypted invitations. But it was extremely useful for a young woman to let men think _their_ expert opinions had been vital in guiding _her_ to a "new" idea. She had certainly had opportunities to learn that lesson when dealing with her own father in the past.)

"To briefly mention the first possibility: I know for a fact, and I suspect that all of you do as well, that my father once had high hopes of appointing Bruce Wayne as his successor."

Gutierrez chuckled for several seconds before saying anything coherent. "I believe those hopes were lowered considerably after Wayne turned against us."

"Agreed. My father never made a formal announcement, and in the last minutes of his life I doubt he wanted to do Wayne that favor. But that thought led me to another: the _second_ possibility for succession allows for a superior warrior to outmaneuver and outfight his predecessor and then claim leadership of the League for himself. In practice, this usually does not happen unless the old leader plainly is past his best years, mentally, but painfully unable to perceive his own decay. But the rules don't require the challenger to prove such a thing about the incumbent before making his challenge."

There was a long pause. Finally Al-Hazred went to the point. "Are you thinking of the man who caused your father's death as a 'challenger' who won a duel?"

"I am toying with the idea," she conceded. "Does anyone wish to respond?"

The men exchanged glances before Gutierrez made a rebuttal. "There is no law requiring a challenger to be one of the Seven, but at the very least he must already be a member of the League. Wayne excelled in the _training_ at our old headquarters, but never passed the final test to become one of us in truth."

"Are you so sure he never qualified?" Talia inquired.

"Of course I'm sure!" Gutierrez snapped. "I was _there_. The final test was to execute a helpless prisoner, as each of us in this room has done in the past. That was when Wayne showed his squeamish side. He had mastered the moves and tactics of a shadow warrior, but in the end he couldn't follow through by using them to lethal effect."

"Didn't he?" She was doing her best to sound innocent and a trifle bewildered by all this. Various people had assured her that she did that very well. "Didn't any of our fellow members die in the subsequent explosions and fire that surrounded his . . . abrupt departure?"

"Several did, including the figurehead who had often answered to the name of 'Ra's al Ghul,'" Al-Hazred confirmed.

Talia nodded. "Our by-laws only say that the candidate for membership must kill a violent criminal to prove he can steel himself for whatever is necessary in service of the greater good; they don't go into detail about how to find that criminal in each instance. It has been _traditional_ for the head of the League to select the victim himself and then instruct the candidate in what must be done, but as near as I can tell from the letter of the law, a candidate who had completed all previous training and then killed some other known criminal would still have proved his mettle, and would automatically be a true member from that moment forward."

She waited a beat, wondering if they would see it coming, and then asked innocently, "Didn't any of the members who died that day have any violent crimes on their records? Before or after they had joined the League themselves?"

There was a long silence this time, broken by Gutierrez chuckling again. "_Si, Señorita,_" he said at last, lapsing into his native tongue for a moment. "Some had been convicted of one thing or another before we identified them as misfits of the proper type and recruited them. Others had joined us and _then_ done things which one government or another would condemn if the matter were proven in court."

Al-Hazred also looked amused, although he was not so prone as Gutierrez to express his feelings in laughter. "Is it then your position, Treasurer, that Wayne _successfully_ completed the final test for membership because of the death and destruction triggered by his _refusal_ to complete that test in the way your father had just specified?"

"Yes," she said simply. "I confess I did not think of it that way when my father told me the story a few days later, when he came to me in Switzerland after his old home had been ruined, but now I find myself wondering. Even if Wayne does not regard himself as a member, loyal or otherwise, does that change the fact that he graduated to full membership by killing some of us, and then escaping our immediate wrath, which showed skill and courage?"

Takaguchi finally spoke on the matter. "Although the point had not occurred to me before . . . I do not recall any rule that says the final test requires the execution of some criminal _other than_ one who is already one of the League himself. "

He had not needed to say that; it was at least a faint sign of support for her that he did say it before the others had set themselves dead against her line of reasoning. Talia had a hunch—nothing solid to back it up—that he was finally getting one step ahead of her and knew exactly where her next argument would lead them.

Since neither of the other two men seemed to have a good rebuttal on the tips of their tongues at this point, she pressed onward to make her next point. "Mr. Gutierrez said it himself: a bona fide member may challenge the head of the League and, if successful, take his place. If Bruce Wayne was already a true member of the League at the time of that battle atop a racing train, then he was simply showing his vigorous disagreement with the policies and tactics of my father, as our by-laws allow a worthy warrior to do. The outcome of their man-to-man duel yielded a clear winner, and Wayne's success in deducing the true nature of the League's plot against Gotham, and then stopping that plot with only slight loss of life among the citizenry, also appears to prove something about who had superior tactical ability."

She thought they all saw it coming by now, but it had to be said plainly. "I suggest, gentlemen, that Bruce Wayne—_even if he does not realize it_—has an excellent claim to being the rightful leader of what remains of the ancient League of Shadows."

* * *

**Author's Note:** Let me reiterate what I said at the start of Chapter One: I'm _inventing_ rules of succession for the League of Shadows as I go along. I very much doubt that Talia's position is what Nolan had in mind, but it suits my own agenda (or my view of her secret agenda, shall we say?) to assume that she may actually have a point!


	3. Chapter 3: The Telling Thrust

**Author's Note:** At the time I posted the second chapter of this (way back in August), I already had a complete draft of what I intended as the third and final chapter. I had written a fair chunk of it that same day. However, I was not working on my own PC, and later that day I discovered that I had accidentally saved an older, incomplete version of the text into the file on a flash drive that had previously contained the full rough draft of Chapter Three.

Over the next several days, I tried using some different software to retrieve the previous version of that file. I _failed_ to get everything back that I'd been working on before I messed up my copying-and-saving process. Faced with this marvelous excuse to procrastinate—ahem! Of course what I _meant_ to say was: "Faced with this horribly demoralizing _tragedy, _I ended up putting off any attempt to keep working on the half (or so) of the remainder of the story which I actually still had available."

However, one of my New Year's Resolutions was to tie up some of the loose ends I have on this site, and so I've been working on this project, intermittently, for the last couple of weeks. In the process I found my old, incomplete rough draft of Chapter Three getting long enough (longer than the version I had and lost in August) that I finally decided to bite the bullet and make the last little bit "Chapter Four." I promise I won't take very long to get that last chapter up, though. For one thing, I'm a lot better now about keeping multiple copies of my fanfic drafts saved in different places so that accidentally ruining one copy of a file doesn't have to be the end of the world.

* * *

**Chapter Three: The Telling Thrust**

Gutierrez laughed again. "I see practical objections. Supposing we told him of your theory, do you truly think he would _wish_ to take up that mantle and lead us in our next great operation? Even if we all pledged to accept his wish that Gotham be spared in favor of a new target?"

"Not at all," Talia said pleasantly. "But then, the League has fallen on hard times for the moment; does anyone seriously think we will be prepared to launch another large-scale operation any time in the next two years, say? No matter how talented a leader we have?"

No one wanted to be the first to say _No,_ but no one loudly said _Yes_ either. Instead:

"Even if we granted the odd proposition that a man who does not know he is a member of the League is nonetheless its proper leader," Al-Hazred mused, "that would scarcely seem to leave us any better off than we were before. A 'leader' who _will not_ lead is no great improvement over no leader at all."

_That all depends on just what functions you want the so-called leader to fill,_ Talia carefully didn't say. Takaguchi's face was bland, but he was staring at her silently; she strongly suspected he was remembering the periods of Japanese history when Emperors had been immensely respected in theory and almost powerless in practice.

Since no one was interrupting him, Al-Hazred continued thinking aloud. "Suppose we could trust Wayne to appoint a few worthy men to the Seven in exchange for a peace treaty—a guarantee to leave the institutions of Gotham City alone for the next half-century, say. If he did that much for us and nothing more, that would both give us quorum and make deadlock less likely, and then we could get on with such decisions as where to put our next training camp, and how to equip it and recruit for it without attracting too many would-be infiltrators from American intelligence agencies, and so forth. As long as Wayne was not present in our meetings, he would not be likely to veto any decisions the reconstituted Seven were reaching. Eventually we could arrange to have Wayne killed, and then elect a new leader to guide us in truth."

Takaguchi raised a hand as Al-Hazred paused. When all eyes were on him, Takaguchi said: "Or perhaps the other way around, if it came to that?"

Gutierrez cocked his head. "How so?"

"We of the Seven might appoint someone to lead a task force to kill Wayne, and tell the commander that _if_ he could defeat the man who defeated Ra's al Ghul, he would prove himself worthy to be our new leader?"

Al-Hazred smiled. "That would work as well as anything. It would allow the designated man to qualify for the job under _both_ the second and third methods of succession—destroying his predecessor, and also having the endorsement of the Seven. Or at least of the necessary _majority_ of four. But all that assumes that the active voters among the Seven become more than just three, which will take quite a while in practice since Wayne is unlikely to cooperate with _anything_ the League may request of him, whether we say he is our new leader or not!"

Talia said, "I do not propose that we approach Wayne with any form of 'deal.' But I do propose that we regard him as our current leader—_in absentia_, as it were. That actually opens up new possibilities. There have been times in the League's long history when a man suddenly became the rightful leader—perhaps because his predecessor had named him as the heir before dying; perhaps because he was elected—but the new leader didn't _know _about his own change of status for quite some time. Usually because he was thousands of miles away, on assignment, when he inherited or was elected. In the centuries when every message had to be carried by hand, it could be a long, long time before he received word of his elevation and returned home to take up the reins. But _someone_ still had to make day-to-day decisions in his absence."

"An _acting deputy_," Al-Hazred said suddenly. "We have not had one in something over . . . a century and a half? Around the time of the First Opium War."

"I believe that is correct," Talia nodded. "Once telegraph wires could carry messages across continents, and then across oceans, a new leader was unlikely to stay incommunicado long enough for a substitute at the helm to seem necessary."

Gutierrez spoke. "I remember a little about acting deputies from a lecture when I was a young recruit, but it has been quite a few years. Will someone please refresh my memory of the special rules and restrictions for that post?"

Al-Hazred seemed happy to do so. "The deputy has most of the authority that a lifetime leader would have—there are limits, though, such as he cannot make any new rules or treaties which are guaranteed to bind the entire League after he is no longer the deputy. Normally a man is appointed to a two-year term. Or the Seven can set a shorter time limit if they choose. In practice it hardly matters, because a man is usually a deputy for _much less_ than two years. His appointment automatically expires at the very moment the new leader arrives at the League's current headquarters. Then the former deputy returns to whatever his normal duties were before."

"But just how is the deputy chosen in the first place?" Gutierrez inquired. "Is there a hard-and-fast number of the Seven who must agree he is the man for the job?"

Al-Hazred stared off into space for a few seconds, evidently searching his capacious memory. "To answer that second question first: No. If the League lacks a true leader—or if the legitimate one is believed to be alive, but is expected to stay very much out of touch for a while longer—then a deputy may be selected for that post by as many of the Seven as are reasonably available to discuss the matter. An absolute majority is not required, since the position is not held for life. Likewise, the deputy lacks the authority to fill any vacancies in the Seven with appointees of his own.

"There is another important rule," he added. "Anyone who accepts the office of 'acting deputy' promptly becomes ineligible to become the permanent leader of the League, no matter what the circumstances, for a period of twenty years. That rule is ancient, but reading between the lines, I suspect the purpose was to prevent any ambitious scoundrel from bribing or coercing _a few_ of the Seven to make him acting deputy when their colleagues were not around to object, and then trying to use that temporary position to pave the way for declaring himself the permanent leader soon after, when he might not possess the slightest chance of convincing a _majority_ of the Seven that he was worthy of that lifetime post."

"Twenty years? Very well!" Gutierrez said brightly. "With that wise rule in mind, who wishes to throw his hat in the ring for the job of acting deputy?" His cheery tone made it clear that he had no intention of sacrificing his own ambitions that way.

The question hung in the air for a good thirty seconds with none of the three men doing or saying anything at all.

It required no great knowledge of psychology to deduce that each man was dearly hoping one of the others would take the plunge and offer to lead the League on a pinch-hitter basis for two years or less. If one did, the other two were bound to accept that offer on the spot; a previously strong rival would have just disqualified himself where the next election for the lifetime post of leader was concerned, which would simplify the political calculus considerably when the time came for a new round of campaigning.

"Any worthy member of the League may be called upon to temporarily fill that gap in our command structure," Talia said finally. "I am willing to serve, if called upon."

"You?" Gutierrez said incredulously, and then winced for some reason, and failed to elaborate on his objection. Talia wondered if Takaguchi had kicked him under the table—Al-Hazred was not well positioned to do so.

Pretending she had noticed nothing out of the ordinary, she said: "A woman cannot be seated as one of the Seven; a woman cannot be elected leader. But a woman can become a member of the League. As Ra's al Ghul's daughter, I have had a lifetime to assimilate the fact that no matter what services I am able to offer our beloved League, in the long run my status _must_ be subservient to a male leader. This means that it would actually be easier for me to quietly relinquish the power of a deputy after a proper leader had arisen to hopefully lead us for decades to come."

_And if you believe all that, I have a bridge to sell you. But it's the diplomatic thing to say right now._

Gutierrez looked at Al-Hazred. "Is the lady correct in saying that, as a qualified member, she is as eligible for the post as any _man_?"

Al-Hazred did not look happy, but his pride would not permit him to lie about the rules of the game. "The lifetime leader of the League must be a man; that is written. But there is less written about deputies. One rule says the person appointed must already be a member of the League. I don't recall any other preconditions, such as a certain level of rank . . . or a certain gender."

"If you gentlemen saw fit to give me a two-year term," Talia suggested, "that would last until the time when any of the Seven who had consistently failed to make contact with us could be presumed dead. One who is dead may be replaced by a majority vote of however many are present, and then when you had quorum, a new leader could be named at will. Or I might lose the job much sooner if a legitimate leader announced himself by other means."

Gutierrez looked doubtful. "You don't mean you'd expect any of us to invite Wayne to become leader in simple fact, do you?"

"I don't think that is quite what the lady has in mind," Takaguchi said softly. "If Wayne is rightful leader because he killed the previous incumbent in mortal combat, then someone else could do the same to him, as we mentioned earlier. But in the meantime, we'd _already_ have someone providing coherent direction for what remains of the League, which is more than the other plan offered."

"Turnabout is fair play," Gutierrez said, catching on. "It is Wayne's fault that we have fallen so low that we can't _elect_ a lifetime leader for awhile yet. But if it turns out we have an _unsatisfactory_ leader still breathing, then we can kill him at any time, invoking the second method of succession."

"And thus accelerate the process of finding a _proper_ leader without needing quorum among the Seven first," Al-Hazred finished triumphantly. "If one of we three kills Wayne, that solves our problems very neatly! If one of the lesser members of the League does the job, he promotes himself to the top and we shall just have to make the best of it!"

"Such a man would need seasoned advisors as he settled into his new role," Takaguchi offered. "There are many secrets that are only known by the leader or those who answer directly to the leader."

"I think we are straying from the point," Gutierrez said. "I came here hoping we would elect a new leader by the end of the day; not just an acting deputy. Now it appears that we _may_ have had a new leader all along—even if neither the Seven nor the man himself were aware of it! Which may mean, yes, that an acting deputy would be a good idea after all. I appreciate the shrewdness of our Treasurer in noticing little points which had escaped our notice at first, but whether _she_ should be the acting deputy is a separate question from whether we need to appoint one at all."

"I find myself leaning toward 'yes' on the _latter_ question," Takaguchi declared. "Shall we take a vote on that point, or do we need to chew on it further?"

They voted by show of hands. All three men now favored the idea. An acting deputy would be chosen before they adjourned.

"Treasurer," Al-Hazred said formally, "I fear the time has come for you to leave the room."

Talia dropped a folded paper in front of him. "My suite number in this building, and also my satellite phone number. Call me when you want me to rejoin you. Or sooner, of course, if there is anything I can do for you while your deliberations continue."

Al-Hazred nodded silently, and Talia strode out of the room without a backward glance.

* * *

Once back in her suite, she stripped off the purple cheong-sam, placed it on a hanger so it wouldn't wrinkle before she needed it again, then settled into lotus position on the carpet.

She knew what she really ought to do now: Thrust politics to the back of her mind and meditate on innocuous subjects for a time, in order to avoid unnecessary agitation as she waited for the men in the conference room to say _Yea_ or _Nay_ to her bid for power. It would never do for her to answer a summons, perhaps an hour from now, with signs of stress visible on her countenance and in her body language . . . rapid breathing, perspiration, a hint of strain in her voice, anything to make them think she had been biting her manicured nails while awaiting the verdict.

But she felt certain they would keep her in waiting for at least an hour, and probably considerably longer, no matter what the decision was. Surely she could afford a quarter hour to evaluate her own performance and consider contingency plans.

_What I particularly liked was the part where I _didn't _threaten, not even by implication, to cut off the flow of money from our remaining Swiss accounts. Al-Hazred, Gutierrez, and Takaguchi know full well that only three people had _all_ the account numbers and access codes as of a year ago, and two of those (my father and one other) died in Gotham. In the absence of a legitimate successor to a fallen leader, the Treasurer is not obligated to share direct control of all those accounts with any stray members of the Seven who may be holding out their hands hopefully. That rule exists in order to avoid financing one or more sides of an internal war. _

_The knowledge of my hand on the purse strings filled the air, but no one mentioned it. If someone else is appointed as acting deputy, he will be totally dependent upon _my_ willingness to tell him what assets the League has left and how to reach out to control them. There is no one alive who could contradict me if I failed to mention a hundred million dollars in one bank, or a similar amount in the form of gold bullion stored in another. _

_Of course, if I had come on heavy-handed, _threatening _to sharply reduce the funding for their agendas unless they gave me what I wanted, all three would have felt the need to kill me for my insolence and disloyalty. Not killing me right there in the conference room, perhaps, but in the near future. Preferably after torturing account numbers and access codes out of me. But I gave them no excuse to say I had flouted League law and thereby forfeited its protections. _

After refreshing her memory of a few other aces up her sleeves—items which the three men in the conference room probably hadn't even guessed at—Talia started meditating in truth so that she would still have her composure when those men saw her again.

* * *

Three hours later they called her back in and told her she was the acting deputy.

A standard two-year term, but (although they didn't say this) she could tell they didn't expect her to last nearly that long before someone terminated Wayne with extreme prejudice.

* * *

**Author's Notes:** No, we're not done yet. There are things going on inside Talia's head that I still need to share with you (since she certainly has no intention of sharing them verbally with Takaguchi, Gutierrez, and Al-Hazred). I've got a complete rough draft of them (saved in different places), but I'll just take a few days to go over it one last time before posting it.


	4. Chapter 4: Secret Truths

**Author's Note: **Several hours after I first posted this chapter, I'm doing a little hasty editing to cover one or two small points which I belatedly realized had not been clearly addressed in the version I posted earlier today.

**Postscript (added Thursday morning): **I think I "replaced" this chapter at least 3 times before I went offline yesterday, as I kept spotting little things that needed to be fixed. Then I was offline for something like 15 hours, and didn't realize there was a huge problem until I logged on today and I saw I'd received a polite PM from a reader about a mixup. The last time around, yesterday afternoon, I must have clicked on the wrong line in a list of my current documents in Document Manager, with the result that I "replaced" the real Chapter 4 with a copy of a one-shot I had posted in the Justice League fandom last week! That must have been up all night, which is _hideously_ embarrassing. I don't think I ever made such a mistake before.

* * *

**Chapter Four: Secret Truths**

Almost midnight.

At last she was alone in her suite again, reviewing the day's work and her private plans for the future.

Once she'd been confirmed in her authority, Talia had kept the other three men working through the afternoon and evening, only breaking it up after 11 p.m. Although she had allowed two meal breaks' each delivered to the conference room from the hotel kitchens. (Their orders had been given priority over those of any other guests of the hotel. Talia didn't think any of the three men were aware that the League of Shadows owned this establishment via a series of dummy corporations, and she'd felt no need to tell them that right away. There were things that only the treasurer and the leader of the League were required to know about the financial structure which subsidized everything else the League did.)

Talia had toyed with the idea of insisting no one would eat _anything_ until after she said they were all done for the day. In theory, this would let the gathering accomplish more in the same timeframe. Any true member of the League had learned to function acceptably under much harsher conditions than missing a couple of meals while sitting in a climate-controlled room.

Ra's al Ghul might have done just that, and seen it accepted by the others as a minor test of their dedication.

But what could pass as proof of "confident and uncompromising leadership" in a man of his stature was liable to be interpreted as "sheer pettiness" when it came from his _daughter_. Oh, she would have gotten away with it in the short run—none of the three men would want to look weaker than the rest by being first to _whine_ about the pangs in his belly—but afterwards they probably would have agreed that she was being childishly dictatorial just for the sake of flaunting her new authority.

After thinking it through that far . . . she'd been sorely tempted to go ahead and give the order _anyway_. If they wanted to underestimate her by thinking that kowtowing to her whims on minor matters would stroke her ego enough to distract her from the important issues, then it might be fun to let them cherish such illusions for a while, and see what happened.

Reluctantly she had set the idea aside. Overall, it was better to stick to the original plan and present the façade of an earnest, hard-working, only mildly ambitious woman who wanted to see necessary tasks identified and solved as efficiently as possible, without wasting too much time on personality clashes and other trifles.

(Some Hollywood personality or other had once said: "The most important thing in this business is _sincerity_. If you can fake _that_, you've got it made!" The same thing applied to real-world intrigue.)

At any rate, several important decisions had been made: Where to establish a new training camp (a quiet spot in the Stanovoy Range in Sakha); which surviving shadow warriors to appoint to start mustering new recruits (under the guidance of Takaguchi); how to spread the word about Wayne's unprecedented status as a rightful leader who didn't know he was and wouldn't want to be even if he knew, and other things. Beyond that, there were areas where she had let each man in turn make a sales pitch for his preferred solution to a problem, and then she'd simply promised to take it all under advisement before announcing a decision. That allowed anyone whose suggestion wasn't taken to save face by believing it had been a very close thing.

The most important thing about these three men was that they were the ones she deemed most likely to support a fresh campaign against Gotham—not tomorrow or even next year, but in due course.

Taleniekov, Fuest, and Holcroft, on the other hand, had already been making noises about abandoning the whole idea in their encrypted communications with the League's Treasurer (Talia, of course) in the weeks following her father's death.

That was why she'd needed to remove them from the playing board for the time being. It was _true_ that Taleniekov had died in Bucharest, as rumored, but not at the hands of Delta Force, nor U.S. Navy SEALs, nor any of the other likely suspects. He had been terminated with extreme prejudice by mercenaries in Talia's employ who knew nothing of her connection with the League of Shadows.

She would have preferred them to take him alive, as they had done with Holcroft and Fuest in separate operations, but Taleniekov's years of experience in doing wet work for the old KGB had made him a wary target indeed, even before the League's training methods added extra seasoning. Talia was convinced that her team had done well to stop him at all, with only two casualties on their own side: One dead, one severely wounded. She was paying for the latter man's surgery, of course, and the doctors believed he would be restored to full fighting trim in due course.

At any rate, the other members of that team had tossed Taleniekov's corpse in a body bag, and later weighted it down and dumped it in the middle of the Atlantic. So long as his death was unconfirmed, there was a two-year clock ticking before a replacement could be selected for his seat on the Seven.

Hoan was still in Blackgate, but the rules said he could not be replaced among the Seven when he was known to be alive and had not broken League law.

Two years from now, if the other three were still missing, they could be presumed dead, and then replacements could be appointed by a majority of however many of the Seven were both alive and available. At that point, the rules would allow them to discount the vote of Hoan (if he were still alive and imprisoned on that date) when calculating how many votes were needed for a "majority."

That law might need to be changed, one of these days—because Talia had found a way to turn it to her own advantage. Since she had Fuest and Holcroft under lock and key, in a dungeon which only she and her father (and now her hired mercenaries) had ever known about, she could arrange for fresh proof of those men's continued existence to be presented to Al-Hazred, Gutierrez, and Takaguchi at any time. (The tricky part would be making sure they didn't realize the proof came from her.)

Waiting, say, twenty months, and then presenting that proof, would reset the clock—another two years before Fuest and Holcroft could lawfully be "presumed dead" and replaced. Wait twenty-two months, and do it again. The result would be to keep the Seven perpetually under-strength, which would make it that much harder for a majority to ever select a new leader-for-life. Instead, a group of three (or even four, if need be) could keep voting to give Talia another two-year term as acting deputy as an "interim measure." Al-Hazred didn't seem to have considered that while a deputy's term could only be two years, there was no prohibition against that deputy being reelected for _multiple_ terms if extreme circumstances continued to prevent the appointment of a regular leader-for-life!

(Appointing a new leader would only become an urgent problem if and when Bruce Wayne died; whether at the hands of one of the League, or because of the other occupational hazards of his secret lifestyle. But if _Ra's al Ghul_ had tried and failed to bring him down in mortal combat, Talia was prepared to gamble that it would be a very long time before anyone else did _better_ at the same task.)

Without such measures on Talia's part—first arranging for some of the Seven to be mysteriously absent, and then arguing persuasively that Wayne was _already_ the rightful leader _in absentia_—this meeting would have seen a majority of the Seven agreeing on a new leader, who _probably_ would have decided to write off Gotham as more trouble than it was worth and move on to some other strategic objective.

That was not to be borne.

There were things Talia would never speak aloud. Not even in a luxury hotel suite which had been swept for bugs by _three_ security firms within the last four hours, while she was planning the League's future with Gutierrez, Takaguchi, and Al-Hazred. But she stood near the glass doors leading to a balcony, and gazed out at the night lights of the city, and silently formed the words she _would_ have said to Ra's al Ghul about her day's work if he could hear.

_This is the best I can do, father. _

_Twice you tried to reduce Gotham's corruption to sheer chaos, and twice your plans were shattered—thanks in large part to the House of Wayne. The men I hunted down lack your vision; they prefer to think we should stop throwing away resources on that objective and seek a softer target for our next great operation. (As if a lesser challenge would be worth the effort of overcoming.) I had to ensure that we would stay on target until we had risen to the challenge and finally proved ourselves worthy by finding the correct strategy to conquer it. _

_And who knows? It may yet come to pass that Bruce Wayne realizes his non-lethal vigilante activities will never cure the diseased city which breeds so many criminals, and then he may recognize that sometimes it is necessary to set an object lesson for the world by dealing with some of the most corrupt cases in similar fashion to how the Biblical God allegedly dealt with Sodom and Gomorrah._

_Whether or not he does see that, I still hope to use my charms as you intended for me to use them: On your favored pupil, the young man who had all the qualities you had sought in a worthy successor. Someday your grandson may yet have the chance to lead the League into a new age, with or without his father's approval. _

_In the last years of your life you wanted three things: Gotham devastated; Bruce Wayne embracing his role as your chosen successor; and he and I mating to combine two worthy bloodlines in a new heir. If I cannot contrive to make all three of those happen within the next several years, I still see reason to hope for at least one or two of them._

* * *

**Author's Notes:** A few comments on differences between the comic book continuity and the Nolanverse continuity, and the assumptions I'm making for my own purposes.

In case anyone was wondering, I _am_ aware that in the novelization of _Batman Begins_, writer Denny O'Neil (the same guy who _created_ Ra's al Ghul and his daughter Talia way back in the 1970s) worked in references to such things as the Lazarus Pit and the idea that Ra's has been using it to keep himself alive and fit for hundreds of years. (In DC comic books, a Lazarus Pit can _literally_ raise the dead. If Ra's gets himself killed, as he often does, his daughter and/or other faithful servants usually retrieve the corpse and cart it off to the nearest available Lazarus Pit so he can make a comeback in a later story.)

But since there was no mention of those ideas in the actual movie, I very much doubt Christopher Nolan considers Lazarus Pits to be part of _his_ Batman continuity. (He might well accept the idea of Ra's al Ghul having a beautiful daughter named Talia, though—that's a simpler and more "realistic" concept.) I decided to work on the theory that in the Nolanverse continuity, Ra's al Ghul was just another mortal man, the latest of _many_ to lead the League throughout its long history, and now that he's dead, his daughter Talia _doesn't_ know of any way to magically bring him back.

The idea of a council of Seven who stand one level below the leader in the League's pecking order, and can elect a new leader if necessary, is one I invented out of thin air. Along with the idea that while a woman can join the League, she cannot rise to a seat on the Seven, nor to being the regularly elected "leader for life" of the entire League. Those assumptions allowed me to play around with ideas for how Talia might plan to sneak in the back door, as it were, via a loophole, if she saw it as her solemn duty to continue her father's work by fair means or foul.

I don't know if I will ever again write about my vision of Talia as she might exist in the Nolanverse, but I'm keeping my options open!

P.S. Although I don't remember consciously thinking of this example when I began working out the plot of this story and writing a rough draft, I may well have been inspired by things I've read on the subject of how, according to the strict letter of the law, J. Edgar Hoover easily could have been removed from his job as the head of the FBI if any U.S. President had worked up the nerve to tell him he was fired. In _theory_, that could have happened at any time over a period of decades (and some Presidents were sorely tempted). In _practice_, J. Edgar became so frighteningly powerful that nobody ever found the nerve to fire him. End result? J. Edgar stayed in the same job for a solid forty-eight years_, _only leaving office when he died at the ripe old age of seventy-seven. From his perspective, the legal fact that _nobody_ had ever appointed him "Director-for-life" had become a meaningless technicality!


End file.
